Regulating the arms trade

A dirty business

A new treaty will rely on shame to curb the illicit trade in weapons

CONFLICTS fuelled by imported weapons were estimated in 2007 to cost Africa at least $18 billion a year, almost cancelling out the amount given in aid. So what happens to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) at the UN in New York next month will be closely followed by those who believe that stemming the flow of weapons is a big step toward curbing violence in the world's most troubled places. Treaty negotiations are due to start on July 2nd.

The talks are the climax of an effort that started in 2003, with a group of Nobel Peace Laureates led by Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and a coalition of pressure groups under the Control Arms Campaign umbrella. Their aim was to secure an international treaty to regulate the global trade in weapons. Britain, thanks partly to the personal interest of Jack Straw, the foreign secretary at the time, lent diplomatic muscle.

Supported by Australia, Argentina, Costa Rica, Finland, Kenya and Japan, in December 2006 Britain brought an initial resolution to the UN calling for work to prepare the way for a treaty. Two years later 133 countries voted in favour of a draft General Assembly resolution backing the treaty, with 19 abstaining and only the United States voting against. In October 2009 the Obama administration joined the consensus (this time Zimbabwe was the lone vote against). That set the timetable leading to next month's conference.

The result could be a treaty by the end of the year, though a senior diplomat close to the talks sees its chances of success as no more than about 60-40. Among the five permanent Security Council members (the P5 in diplomatic jargon), Russia and China remain ambivalent, although they have no veto power to prevent it passing. The Gulf Arab states are uneasy, too. To get the widest agreement and the biggest arms exporters (the P5 and Germany) on board, the rather good draft treaty risks being riddled with loopholes. Tensions over Syria, where Russia is supplying the regime with weapons and Saudi Arabia is quietly helping the rebels, could derail the process too.

Campaigners want the treaty's backers to hold their nerve. Oxfam, a charity, highlights the trade in ammunition, worth $4 billion a year. America, China, Syria and Egypt all want it taken out of the draft. Oxfam and Amnesty International this week drove an old tank round London to dramatise their demand for a robust treaty.

No ploughshares yet

Even the treaty's strongest supporters do not claim that it will solve everything. But if it passes more or less intact, it will curb the flow of weapons to the most vulnerable and ill-governed places. It could save many thousands of people, mostly civilians, from violent death and injury. The draft treaty is pragmatic. It does not question the right of states to acquire the means of self-defence. Nor does it touch on their right to decide laws governing the ownership and transfer of weapons within their own borders, though America's gun lobby tries to depict the treaty as a dastardly UN attack on the Second Amendment.

Instead the ATT seeks to bring a bit of order to a market where national export-control rules leave gaps that rogue firms and dealers exploit. It wants high common international standards that will make it harder for weapons of all kinds to reach the illicit market. Countries involved in the export or transfer of arms will have to scrutinise more rigorously both the potential use of a weapon, and who will be the ultimate user.

The most important provision will forbid governments to authorise a trade if there is a “substantial risk” of the arms being used for one or more of five purposes: to provoke or aggravate regional or sub-regional instability; to commit serious violations of humanitarian or human-rights law; to hamper efforts to reduce poverty; to commit transnational organised crime; or to support or perpetrate terrorist acts. Treaty signatories will be expected to pass domestic legislation to ensure that their own arms firms comply. Each year they will have to report on their weapons-trading to an “implementation support unit”. This body's main sanction will be to name and shame transgressors.

Sceptics will argue that some countries can sign up but still connive in feeding the illicit arms market, whereas others will not sign up at all. That does not make the treaty worthless. In the first place, respectable arms firms in Europe and America are fairly keen on the ATT. It should simplify their regulatory burden by replacing a host of different national rules with one international code, and it gives them some protection against doing business with dodgy entities that may damage their reputations and get them into legal trouble: ATT compliance could become something like an ISO standard. A British defence executive who represented the industry in the preparatory negotiations says that it could make it easier to sign supply contracts in countries with relatively low costs and a skilled workforce—places big firms might previously have avoided. Second, the ATT is likely to raise standards over time through the strange mechanism of embarrassment. At first the treaties banning indiscriminate use of anti-personnel mines and cluster bombs attracted only partial support. But a new global norm is gradually establishing itself, by which it may become shameful for self-respecting countries to use such weapons. As Steve Crawshaw of Amnesty International puts it: “Do not underestimate the power of a piece of paper.”